This is pretty cool.

[zsdersw]

What's even more amazing is that the basic Voyager design was not state of the art when it was launched. As I mentioned they use an updated Mariner design, which itself started off as an updated version of the Ranger probes that were sent to the moon. Part of me is sad that the much more ambitious TOPS design never got funded, but it's also inspiring to see how they accomplished so much on a relative shoestring.

Simpler things tend to work better, longer, than more complicated things.

 

[ichy]

Simpler things tend to work better, longer, than more complicated things.

Sometimes, but "better, faster, cheaper" was taken too far by NASA in the late 1990s. There's no substitute for redundancy and extra systems.

 

[zsdersw]

Sometimes, but "better, faster, cheaper" was taken too far by NASA in the late 1990s. There's no substitute for redundancy and extra systems.

So long as each addition is as simple as possible it benefits the overall system, but if it adds too much complexity its lifespan will tend to be shorter.. even if it's meant as a redundancy.

 

[werepossum]

WP, the problem is that it is easier to coordinate two objects through a rotational relay system than 5.

The math involved to send another out that would be able to be targeted and relay the signal to another, etc etc gets astronomical (no pun) very quickly.

It may work, but chances are, it will not be equipment failure that renders it useless very quickly.... (Besides, we are talking about scale of antennae here too..... Maybe a giant orbiting antenna would work better than a string of small moving ones.....)

I was thinking of a probe on the same trajectory, but Ichy makes a good point that this might be quite difficult to accomplish.

I know we're splitting hairs at this point but I think that if NASA had had any extra money for the Voyager program they would have either built an additional probe or improved the capabilities of the current ones (which amazingly enough are just rehashed Mariner designs) rather than spending money on relays. It's cool that the Voyagers are still transmitting science data, but the current mission pales in significance compared to what they accomplished during their planetary encounters.

Re: power, I'm not sure that their radio transmitters can be operated at reduced power, I'm pretty sure that they're either on or off.

Oh, one additional problem with a relay probe would be that they would not be able to follow Voyager's trajectory. They took advantage of a very unique planetary alignment for their grand tour, and any trailing relay that was launched a year or two later would not be able to do the same thing.

Good points. I hadn't thought of how energy-intensive it might be matching the Voyager trajectory without benefit of the same planetary gravitational forces, or whether the transmitted were (or could have been) designed to transmit at reduced power, just that I hate that we are going to lose the data stream when the instruments are still collecting data. Often with space-based instruments its the data you didn't expect that are the most interesting.

 

[woolfe9999]

I distinctly remember as a kid hearing about voyager taking pictures of Mars and that it was going on to see Jupiter and could eventually leave the solar system. That was about 33 years ago I heard this. It's amazing what humans can accomplish when we have the will.

 

[ichy]

I distinctly remember as a kid hearing about voyager taking pictures of Mars and that it was going on to see Jupiter and could eventually leave the solar system. That was about 33 years ago I heard this. It's amazing what humans can accomplish when we have the will.

Voyager never flew by Mars.

 

[(sic)Klown12]

Voyager never flew by Mars.

They never flew towards Mars, but when they was launched Mars and Earth were very close in their orbits. Close enough that they could test the cameras by imaging Mars(with little to no detail given the distance, but just to test that nothing bad happened to the equipment during launch), though whether or not they actually did is another question.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/media/15101/This-animation-shows-the-paths-of-the-Voyager-1-and

Animation of the flight paths of both probes.

 

[Jeff7]

How long before we are unable to communicate with it any more?

I think the first thing that's going to kill that ability is loss of sufficient power to run enough systems to keep the thing truly active.
We're only communicating with it at a few hundred bits per second right now.

How far from the earth can we communicate with a probe?

It all depends on how big the antennas are on both ends, and how powerful the transmitters are.
Some of the proposed fission-powered missions to Jupiter would have used laser communications, so we could have had downlinks from there of a few megabits per second, from something a few hundred million miles away.

</img>

From 2009.

The boundary where the solar wind stops has already been crossed by Voyager 1 I believe.

I think the solar wind is still going out there; that termination shock thing is where it slows down quite abruptly, though it's still moving pretty damn fast.

 

[trenchfoot]

I'm tickled to think that Voyager I had vacuum tube technology in it. What was it, in the trasmitter assy? Would've been nice to stick a vacuum tube turntable in it to play a looping platter message of some sort. lol

 

[RbSX]

How long before we are unable to communicate with it any more? How far from the earth can we communicate with a probe?

The issue is not distance, rather, power. The plutonium power supply is anticipated to run out in 2020, at that point we will be unable to communicate with it anymore.